Singe (15 page)

“No,” Addie gasps, weirdly unnerved by herself. “I wouldn’t, I don’t—” She could rub hard now and that would be it, that easily. She pushes at Eli with her knees, feeling wriggly and trapped. “I don’t like being watched?” It comes out sounding like a question, her fingers stalled out between them.

“Are you sure?” Eli twists his hips, slides his hand up behind her calf, rubbing at the muscle there. “Could make you like me, could make you like it.” He puts his forehead down on the mattress beside Addie’s shoulder, turns to whisper in her ear. “You gonna come for me, baby? I want you to. I want you to come.”

And God, it’s so tacky that that’s what does it but it
does
, her body falling all over itself to obey him and this wicked, delicious orgasm that radiates from her middle down to very the tips of her toes. Her fingers don’t even move. Her
fingers
don’t even
move
. All it takes is the drag and pressure of Eli inside her and his low rumbly voice in her ear and that’s it, do not pass go, do not collect two hundred dollars. Addie keens. She tries not to. Even as it’s happening it feels like admitting to something she’s not entirely sure she wants to admit.

“That’s it,” Eli tells her as she finishes, sounding pleased and a little bit desperate. He kept moving all the way through it, these long sure strokes Addie feels absolutely everywhere. He smells like cheap soap and like skin. “You’re beautiful, Addie. Jesus, I could watch you do that all day.”

Addie rolls her eyes but she thinks Eli doesn’t see her and anyway she doesn’t get all the way there with the gesture, quitting halfway through as he presses his face in the crook of her shoulder and comes. She wraps her legs around his and pulls him deep enough to hurt.

“Shit,” Eli gasps. “Oh, Addie, shit.”

He goes dead-weight after he finishes, heavy across Addie’s hips and chest. All four of her limbs are wrapped around him now, and for a second Addie lets herself give in to the impulse to cling. The back of his head is soft against her palm as she pets him, springy dark curls. Most firefighters have military-style buzz cuts—
hair may not touch the ear, eyebrows, or collar; length and bulk of the hair must not interfere with or protrude from headgear
—but Eli’s always seems to be at least three weeks grown out. Brooks has written him up for it more than once. Eli claims his hair just grows fast.

“So good,” he’s muttering, sucking wetly at the vulnerable skin under her jaw. “So good, baby, you’re so pretty. Feels so good with you.”

Addie swallows. “We really have to go back now,” she says. Her own hair is still wet from the shower, soaking the pillowcase under her head. She’s going to have to rebraid it, hope nobody back at the station pauses to consider how she got clean. Already her mind is racing over all the ways they could get caught, if Eleven called the hospital, if the hospital called Eleven. When she touches her throat, she realizes she forgot to take off her cross.

“Yeah.” Eli sighs, reaching behind himself to unhook her legs. “Guess we do.” He smacks a casual kiss off Addie’s cheek before standing, pulling himself and the condom out with a practiced hand. “Next time though, we go slow, okay?”

Addie rolls her eyes again, but her heart isn’t in it.

“Oh, and—” Eli pauses inside the bedroom door, turning to face her. His expression is unreadable. “I really am sorry. I just, I lost my head, okay? There was a kid.”

“There was a kid,” Addie repeats, not a hundred percent sure what that has to do with anything. Her body and brain are sluggish, sleepy and sex-slow. Her gaze flicks to his ravaged chest one more time, back up at his handsome face. It feels like there’s an obvious question here, but Addie can’t quite make herself ask it.

“Go put clothes on, cowboy,” is all she says in the end, taking a deep breath and swinging her noodley legs over the side of his mattress. “We gotta look alive.”

Eli’s wrong that the next time they’ll go slower. The next time is two nights later in the passenger seat of the Outback, him asleep in the bunks at two in the morning and Addie shoving her knee into his side until he wakes up, them sneaking out to the parking lot as quietly as they can. The time after
that
he shows up at her apartment with coffee and a two-dollar cat toy before shift, truly intending to be gentlemanly; they end up doing it on the beanbag chair, Addie nearly falling onto the floor halfway through and the bright, delighted sound of her laughter.

Hester gets out of the animal hospital. Eli ignores calls from Karen the lab tech and a municipal HR rep named Suzanne. Addie still won’t let him take her out on a date. Other forbidden activities involve opening doors for her, sitting too close in Eleven’s rec room, and calling her “Addie” in front of Jill Buono. Once, Eli tries to surreptitiously buy her a beer when they’re out with everyone from Eleven and nearly gets kneecapped under the table for his trouble. The one thing she’ll let him pay for is takeout, so Eli starts ordering it all the time, trying to lure her over to his sad apartment with sesame chicken and pepper steak, oyster pails full of rice. It doesn’t go bad as quickly as standard grocery fare, at least.

The end of June drags on, long and hot. The Fire Marshal’s Office determines the arson that killed Drew Beecher and the one with the little girl were linked, same accelerant, same MO, the perpetrator of both still at large. Eli keeps his head down when Brooks makes the announcement during eight a.m. lineup, when the county papers start speculating about a serial arsonist. The anniversary of Will’s death creeps closer. On nights when he isn’t with Addie, Eli re-reads the first three chapters of
A Hundred Years of Solitude
over and over and tries to ignore the beer in his fridge.

“Wait,” he asks Addie one day at her apartment, both of them sacked out on the futon. “Is this thing the same time every year?”

He means her T-shirt,
Saint Bonaventure’s 18th Annual Italian Festival, July 7-14, 2005
. In addition to rejecting his attempts at chivalry, Addie still prefers to put her clothes back on after they finish—panties, sleep shirt, jewelry, in that order. She also has Festival tees from 2008 and 2009, plus an old St. Pius volleyball polo. Eli’s favorite is 2005 because he can see her nipples through the worn cotton.

“What?” Addie murmurs, huffing against his neck. It was good for her this time, he thinks. He can’t get a clear read on her, how she always looks vaguely shocked when he manages to get her off. He thinks maybe he ought to be offended, that she expects so little of him. Instead it just makes him want to get her off more. “The fair? Yeah, it’s next week, I’ll probably take my little cousins.”

“Mm-hmm.” Eli nods, rubbing at the muscley olive curve of her calf, her foot pressed flat against his rib cage. The insides of her thighs are winter-pale. “Could take me too.”

Addie laughs. “Just dying to hang out with my family in the parking lot of my church, are you?” she asks, reaching for the can of Diet Coke on her coffee table. When he kissed her earlier, her mouth tasted syrupy-sweet. “And the priest who baptized me, can’t forget him.”

“I’m serious,” Eli says mildly. “I like carnivals. I’m great at that one game where you shoot the water into the clown’s mouth.”

“Uh-huh,” she says, smirking in that way she does when the conversation’s closed. “I’m sure you are.”

Eli frowns. He’s not exactly sure what her deal is, Addie Manzella, what it is about him in particular that completely rules him out as useful to her for anything other than sex. It’s been almost a month, that they’ve been doing this. He wasn’t expecting to want more as much as he does. “You’re missing out,” he tells her. “I could have won you a giant stuffed bear.”

Addie huffs, getting up to put the pizza box away. “Please, you can’t even aim the hoses.” It’s a Saturday night, both of them a third of the way into their forty-eight hours off. They were out of sync for a while, but Eli worked a couple of doubles and now their schedules line up perfectly. Addie was annoyed until he pointed out Sharpie and Parker’s did too, and no one ever thought they were screwing.

“I can so,” Eli protests, shoving up on his elbows. “I have great aim. Wanna bet?”

“Bet what, you can hit fires?” Addie piles the leftover slices into a mishmash of Tupperware containers. Downstairs in the club, the music is just starting to pick up, a poppy, syncopated beat Eli knows from experience will last until three a.m. The AC unit drowns it out for the most part, but it gets extra-loud in the bathroom, something to do with the vents. “Pretty broad target, buddy.”

“Shut up, I do okay at the firefighter barbecues.” The county’s main fundraiser is really more of a muster: engine parades and a beer tasting, water demonstrations from the antique pumper that’s housed over by Fifteen. But the biggest part is inter-company competitions, hose lays and ladder climbs, that sort of thing. Eleven hasn’t had a winner since David Manzella was captain. “Plus, a hose definitely isn’t the same thing as a carnival gun.”

Addie sighs, hands on her hips. “Uh-huh.” Eli tries to get a read on her face, figure out how his night is going to swing. Sometimes she lets him crash here and sometimes she doesn’t, but Eli especially likes it when she does on Saturdays because it means he can watch her get ready for Mass in the morning. He likes how she looks in her stockings. He likes to watch her pull them up her legs. If he didn’t have a Catholic schoolgirl fantasy before, well.

Now he follows her into the kitchen with their beer bottles and the paper towels they were using as napkins, plants a kiss on the back of her smooth, warm neck. When he turns his head Eli spies a sleeve of plastic cups above the refrigerator, the cheap red kind you use for parties. That’s when he gets an idea.

“Okay,” he says, straightening up and reaching for them. “Check it out.” He stacks three cups in a pyramid on her kitchen counter, then sticks a dented bottle cap on top of
that
and pulls the sprayer nozzle out of the kitchen sink. “How’s that for a small target?” he asks her, grinning. “I hit it, you take me with you to your thing, how about?”

Addie stares at him, still holding her Tupperware. “That is…the stupidest idea I’ve ever heard,” she says.

Eli grins. “Sounds like somebody who’s worried she’s gonna lose.” He aims the nozzle in her direction, feinting like he’s gonna spray her.

Addie doesn’t flinch. “You’re an idiot,” she declares, tapping the Tupperware bottom against her open palm. Then, “What do I get when you miss?”

“Oh,
when
I miss, I see how it is.” Eli raises his eyebrows. “What do you want?”

Addie shrugs. “Will let you know when I want it, how about?”

“
Carte blanche
, huh?” Eli whistles. “Pretty steep for a bottlecap contest.”

“So’s asking to meet my family,” she replies.

Well. “Fair,” Eli agrees after a beat, flipping on the faucet and testing the sprayer nozzle a couple of times in the sink basin. “You ready for this, princess?”

Addie scoffs, putting her leftover pizza away in the fridge and slamming the door. “Should we do a blood oath on this bet too?” she asks. “Round out the fifth grade vibe?” She’s straightened up to watch, though, shoving her messy Shirley Temple curls out of her face. Her underwear is blue-and-white sailor stripes.

Eli squares his feet and shoulders, lining up. “You’re just jealous of my skills.” It really is a small fucking target. Eli inhales, takes aim. Exhales, squeezing the trigger.

The bottle cap topples.

Addie’s graceful in defeat, all told, just a lift of those film-star eyebrows, a tilt of her head and a “Well done” before she picks the aluminum disc up off the linoleum and tucks it into her palm for safekeeping. Eli’s not stupid, so he doesn’t gloat. It seems like the intelligent strategy. Later that night she lets him go down on her while she sprawls in her fussy armchair, the slightly chemical taste of the latex from earlier mixed in with her familiar salty tang.

“Give you whatever you want anyway,” he promises, right before he gets her to orgasm. It took a while this time, Addie squirming in a way Eli wasn’t entirely sure was pleasure; when he tried backing off though, she kicked at him until he kept going. “Whatever you want, princess, will give you
whatever—
”

“Who says I want anything?” Addie interrupts him, then closes her eyes and comes.

So. Win some, lose some.

Chapter Ten

The first night of the fair’s the coolest it’s been in weeks, seventies with a breeze coming down from the mountains, the sun an orange ball of flame sinking low in the sky. It’s dumb, but normally this is one of Addie’s favorite evenings of the year, how the church grounds and parking lot get transformed by the neon lights of the carnival rides, the noisy electronic chirp of the games and the heavy smell of fried dough and hot dogs. It’s old-fashioned, or something. It’s nice.

“I wanna go on the bumper cars,” Dante announces the second they hit pavement, perched like a little tyrant on Phillip’s shoulders. They’re the only two male cousins in the whole family, Phillip and Dante, twenty-five years apart and the golden boys of their generation. Addie remembers the way Gram doted on Phillip when they were kids, her first grandson, her oldest child’s oldest child. When Marina gives birth, Phillip will be the proud father of the first
great
-grandson too. It’s fitting.

“I want to do the Zipper,” Paulina whispers, twisting her fingers between Addie’s. Last year, she threw up down the front of her T-shirt in the swirling metal cage, then begged to do it twice more.